Sunday, October 24, 2010

Living Room: Before and After

The living room is finally "done". I use the quotes because I still have to refinish the door, clean the windows, and remove the horrible 80's door-thingee from the front of the fireplace.

I also realized that I started this project in fall of 2009, which is ridiculous. I used the same process as the dining room: 2 coats of dye stain, 2 coats of shellac (50:50 mix of amber shellac and alcohol), glaze with Old Masters Dark Walnut Gel stain, 1 more coat of shellac, and finally a layer of dark brown Briwax.

Here are a couple things I learned during this project

If you decide to use an alcohol based dye stain, you have to be very careful with the first coat of shellac to avoid pulling up the dye and causing streaks. The best advice I can give is to start with an extremely light coat of shellac so the alcohol flashes off quickly to avoid pulling up the dye.

Thanks for all the positive comments. Josh, a couple of other details on the finish. The dye is Transtint Golden Brown. Adding a second coat of dye really gave the wood a much warmer, richer look. I went through an insane number of stain combinations, so if you ever want to see what the other Transtint brown dyes look like, just let me know. Each dye concentrate costs about $18 and I think I bought 7 of them!